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According to Wikipedia, button pushing is trolling (in the original sense that is).

In Internet slang, a troll is someone who posts inflammatory,[2]extraneous, or off-topic messages in an online community, such as an online discussion forum, chat room, or blog, with the primary intent of provoking readers into an emotional response[3] or of otherwise disrupting normal on-topic discussion

I rest my case

I really don't understand your obsessive distaste for VMS as I have worked in numerous environments where it was used very successfully. Please remember that it is an operating system that was designed and written to run DEC/VAX hardware. In that respect it is more like IBMs OS/34, OS/38 and OS/400, and is certainly not an "academic" universal, development like Unix or Linux.

Microsoft is a strange case, as it is hard to really define a consistent design strategy over time. It all seems to be very marketing driven.

They started off by buying DOS and developing progressive versions, and of their "Windows" GUI for it. With Windows 95 they tried to integrate the DOS OS with the Windows GUI. They were also developing NT4.0 at the same time, and obviously didn't have enough resources for the two projects.

I guess everything finally worked out with Win98SE and Windows 2000 Pro.

Then they launched their next OS which was XP and intended to integrate all their desktop products. This pretty much worked from the start.....with 3 SPs in 11 years as opposed to 6 in under 5 for NT4.0

Vista is obviously another new development, was delivered late, and again they didn't quite get it right.

Windows7 I would say is the corrected version of that, and Windows8 is just an enhanced version of Windows7.

You can't really identify a continuous "based on" because these are commercial products that are intended to have an EOL, and be replaced with something different.

If you are looking for continuity, I would say that so far (with the notable exception of XP), whenever they have tried something really innovative, it hasn't worked first time out.

It is far easier to see strategy and continuity in Apple's products, but they have to have a much more cautious and disciplined approach because of the interdependency of their OS and hardware businesses. They certainly couldn't afford a Vista or ME

Well, it ought to be helpful, as virustotal runs quite a few malware detectors, so if you get positives you should be very wary of the file.

At the same time submit the file name to Google or other search engine and see what other people have to say about it........no hits looks like random naming, which would be unusual for legitimate software.

There are a number of sites that specialise in giving information on what product files belong to and whether they are considered safe.

As well as that, note the size of file and its location, if installed. The sites I mention will usually tell you the sizes and locations of legitimate copies.......if it's anywhere else or a different size then it is probably malware.

Nihil; Do you remember back when there was an Email going around that you'd get from a real family member or friend telling you that a "New Virus" was going around, and that the way you could tell if you had it, was to go to a certain area, and if you saw a file named a certain name with a Teddy Bear Icon, you were infected.... LOL.

I still remember that, and how many people would delete that, thinking it was a Virus, when, really, I considered it a really clever scam. When you can make people do the same thing you would maybe want a virus to do, that's kind of neat.

Yeah, I do remember there were a whole raft of pranks and hoaxes designed to make fools of the recipients IIRC?

In the context of the OP's post, the modern equivalent is the Scareware that he seems to have encountered, only the objective now is to rip off the recipient

Talking of pranks (and this was NOT deliberate), a mate of mine desperately wanted to borrow an HDD a few days ago. He didn't want PATA, so the best I could do was the 320GB SATA II drive I had just tested my Core i7 2600K rig on.

Couple of days later he calls me and says he's been working on it two days and it won't load Windows7.......all he gets is a blinking cursor. He had also tried the 32bit Windows8 Release Preview DVD that I had given him, and that did the same.

He'd run an HDD test and checked the boot sequence in his BIOS, but still no joy. OK at least that meant his box was booting BIOS, and the problem had to be detecting an OS. As the disk check worked it could obviously get into DOS, so why not a bootable Windows medium?

I went round to have a look and a and found that it would install the loader for Windows Vista 32bit, but not much else after that. It gave a message about "GTP" which finally caught me on.

The Intel box had defaulted to the more modern GTP partitioning, whilst his older AMD rig and BIOS were looking for an MBR setup.

Strange that Windows7 & 8 didn't just load from the DVD and report the problem, when the older crappier Vista did?

The quick solution was to wipe the drive with DBAN then it worked just fine. I know you can get utilities to do conversions, but he had a dead box with an unusable drive.

It gave me a good laugh though........couldn't have done better if I'd tried

LOL! The Good ol' Days huh Nihil? Part of me actually misses some of those things from then you know? I dunno, it was fun sometimes lol, getting an Email from someone you've never heard of telling you to Delete **** in your System Folders as though this was somehow a good idea, and morons lining up to listen to THIS stranger, and yet, you couldn't get them to listen to you, even once lol.